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Nuclear weapons are primarily defensive in nature and
represent the ultimate insurance against foreign invasion. This must be the
backdrop for the future of Trump-Kim meeting for which the expectations seem to
have been hastily heightened and not the much-exaggerated “historic” meeting
between the leaders of the two Koreas. No less “historic” meetings were already
held twice before––in 2000 and 2007––and the 1992 Joint Declaration for the
Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula literally stated that “The South and
the North shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy
or use nuclear weapons.” We are at the very beginning, not at the end, of a long road
that may lead to nuclear-free peace with North Korea, but quite realistically
may not. Even worse, with the exaggerated expectations now, the Trump
Administration has actually increased the risk of a large-scale conflict.

Why Shinzo Abe Visited Serbia On January 17, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wrapped up a five-day trip to northern and southeastern Europe. After visiting Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, he went to Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania. His trip to the Baltic and the Balkan regions fits within Tokyo’s decades-long attempts to establish itself as a global economic and political leader, and to increase its sphere of influence via the use of soft power and the employment of its financial prowess as a diplomatic lever. On his Balkan leg of the trip, a few points require attention. The least important one, but also perhaps the most entertaining, was Abe’s visit to Romania, which would have been a boring diplomatic success for both sides complete with even more boring press communiques — had the Romanian prime minister, Mihai Tudose, not resigned the night before Abe’s arrival, thus leaving his Japanese counterpart unattended. The embarrassment for the Japanese guests, and for the Romanian hosts,…

2016 was the year of the most missile tests conducted ever by North Korea, a total of 24. Since the beginning of 2017, the regime in Pyongyang had ratcheted up the tests, currently at 17, with the promise to reach a new all-time high, and surpass the last year’s record. The last test, conducted symbolically on the 4th of July, marked a new milestone by introducing an intercontinental capability to the Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with a range that could reach Alaska and potentially Seattle. It is now believed that North Korea will soon be able to develop and mount miniaturized nuclear warheads to its ICBMs and become an even greater threat to its neighbors, and the United States. The urgency of the current developments, fast outpacing the expected timetable for acquiring such capabilities, has raised the stakes at Washington, Seoul, Tokyo, Moscow, and Beijing, prompting for fast new policies targeting the military belligerence of the rogue state. What are the main policy op…

A year ago, on the eve of the Brexit vote, many went to bed confident that the referendum was one big showoff event for those who held a deep-rooted, but utterly misplaced, contempt for the political, social, and economic consequences for the UK’s membership in the EU. They expected that at the end of the day sanity would prevail. Their complacency did them in! Then in November, many went to bed in the US, believing that what happened in the UK half a year before was a unique event, Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency was a joke, and he had virtually no chance of prevailing. Complacent again. If voters - and more importantly, those among them complacent enough to believe that democracy would take care of itself without a robust get-out-the-vote effort - knew then what they know now, they certainly would have gone to the polls. But they didn’t. Instead, they bet on pollsters’ predictions. Their forecasts could not have been more wrong. In the Brexit referendum, only 36% of …

Why Trump's Refusal to
Commit Unconditionally to Article 5 is Such a Blow to the Alliance
In international politics, talk is cheap, deception is a
virtue, naiveté and missed opportunities cost dearly. These are among the
lessons I learned years ago from my professor of IR, John Mearsheimer of
University of Chicago. Certainly, Hobbes or Machiavelli would agree with such
statements. But, unlike in the anarchic balance of power world, the
micro-cosmos of collective security systems and is built on unconditional
common commitments and mutual trust. Security alliances’ deterrent power rests,
among other things, on the Musketeerian doctrine of “all for one and one for
all,” as well as on the mutual resolve to apply it. NATO’s Article 5 plays that
precise role and it has been the cornerstone of the alliance’s deterrence power
for near seven decades. That is why Donald Trump’s
speech on May 25th in Brussels to the heads of the member-states of
the alliance, and his failure explicitly and …

If Japan wanted to develop nuclear weapons, there would be no better moment than now to start. As the North Korean regime grows desperate to get a more generous ransom against its nuclear program, its threats to Tokyo grew multifold. Last week Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, warned that North Korea is preparing to launch missiles with sarin against Tokyo. The U.S. President, Donald Trump, further added to the turmoil by declaring last week that an “armada” of American military vessels is heading to the Korean peninsula, only to be contradicted by his own military, which broke the news that days later the “armada” was sailing nearby Singapore, over 3,000 miles away from the Korean peninsula, and reportedly has been travelling in the opposite direction. So much for the credibility of the American “extended deterrence”, which should guarantee the security umbrella over Japan, a policy in force since 1975. Now, both South Korea and Japan feel cheated and let down, while the U.S. …

A Japanese diplomat once replied to an American counterpart asking him about the principles of the Japanese foreign policy by pointing, “Your country may be based on principles, ours is based on archipelago”. Geographic boundaries are rarely elastic, even when socially constructed. Cultural boundaries may seem more elastic, but like the physical ones, they too are rarely prone to fundamental changes. More importantly, the latter often determine the perception of the former. In “The Revenge of Geography” Robert Kaplan argued in a powerful way that ignoring geography may be a fatal mistake that could prevent us from understanding the nature of many political conflicts. What he ostensibly omitted from his paradigm is the difference between physical and human geography. A cursory look would show that when the two overlap, greater stability ensues. But when they don’t, a search of identity could take many paths, not all of them leading to stability.